Case Study: Sutherland Improve Remote Performance Management

This case study investigates how Sutherland adapted their remote performance management strategy and achieved great gains in customer satisfaction.

Sutherland, a global business process transformation company spanning 19 countries, has competed largely on the excellence delivered by its customer service operations teams.

Already operating at a high service level due in large part to its robust quality evaluation process, the company sought a holistic approach to agent optimization.

Sutherland wanted to augment its performance and engagement. Their aim was to create engagement and manage performance in a remote environment.

Sutherland started with a small program of 35 when they began with Playvox in December 2015 with the tools and intelligence needed to improve the customer experience. Nearly five years later, in May 2020, Sutherland has more than 7,000 users of Playvox.

Sutherland’s solution requirements included:

• A cloud-based platform
• An all-in-one platform
• Team engagement and rewards
• Client branding
• Performance gamification
• Consistent coaching and feedback
• Quality audit results
• Learning: Continuous improvement and skills development

The Solution

Moving up to custom scorecards yields motivated, productive agents. Sutherland began with performance, motivation, and coaching and added quality using FTP, which spans interactions for accounting, customer service, post-service management, knowledge, sales, and technical support.

With Playvox, the large service provider was able to:

Improve

• Scale their business according to seasonal fluctuations
• Enhance teams’ performance, resulting in a positive impact on their clients’ customers
• Efficiently identify specific interactions that require agent coaching based on performance results
• Motivate through recognition, QA results and targeted development

Inspire

• Facilitate fluid intra-team communications
• Make agents more involved in their own evaluation process
• Empower agents to monitor their progress, leading to self-oriented improvement and higher motivation levels
• Enable all team members to participate in and comment on their evaluation and coaching processes

Evaluate

• Centralize evaluations for the Quality Review process and closely manage both inbound and outbound interactions
• Upgrade from spreadsheets to customizable scorecards to better target agent improvement opportunities (both soft and hard skills)

Results

Numbers show huge gains in a short period of time

After starting with 35 Playvox users in 2015, Sutherland has more than 7,000. Going through the maths, that equates to a 19,900% growth in 4.5 years.

It’s a huge BPO group spread across 27 Playvox platforms with 1,100 among its largest customer service team.

The Playvox Agent Optimization Suite provides Sutherland with plenty of solutions to easily move across multiple sites, such as duplicating scorecards, coaching templates, learning courses, recognition badges, and especially community posts.